Mr. Brendan Rogers:

I do not think so. I agree that those questions are fair. The Synthesis report is a summary of nine reports, reflecting the significant work carried out since we last met in December 2013. Uganda has been visited approximately 12 times. I have been to Uganda three times. It has been very intensive work. The reports cover the nine programme countries and they conclude that the systems are fairly strong and pretty adequate in a lot of cases but like every forensic audit, there are all kinds of gaps and areas that need to be strengthened.

The Department has accepted all those recommendations. Standardisation of the management systems is where the greatest gap occurs. The management systems were reasonably strong but they had grown separately under different heads of missions and different personnel. We have to implement a standardised system. These recommendations are telling us to standardise the management systems, the floor funds, the MOUs and the work with NGOs. As a result we have established a task group which is chaired by the head of our programme-country section. Over the next few months we will be working very hard to ensure that when we next meet the committee, there will be a very high-level strong and standardised system in place. Some of this will involve cross-learning because some of the missions have done excellent work and we need to cross-fertilise that learning into the other systems.